


waking up (to ash and dust)

by lilyrose225



Category: Bleach
Genre: Extended Winter War (Bleach), M/M, Oops, Time Travel Fix-It, implied - Freeform, originally they just forgot about poor rukia, rukia's in here for about two seconds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 15:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14918258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyrose225/pseuds/lilyrose225
Summary: Kisuke's been many places in his life; the past is new though.  Unfortunately, he's got time to think and his mind is his worst enemy.Uraichi Week 2018; here, have ~2k of OOC Kisuke angst.





	waking up (to ash and dust)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Swinging Pendulum](https://archiveofourown.org/works/855577) by [cywscross](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cywscross/pseuds/cywscross). 



> Nominally for Uraichi Week 2018 (https://archiveofourown.org/collections/UraIchi_Week_2018/profile), but I'm really bad at posting on time. Heavily inspired by SP and cwyscross' works in general--forget this fic and go check them out instead.
> 
> Betaed by the lovely eclipsemidnight, with help from the Discord chat by LadyAdain, Candle-Waster, and Starrie. Come join us in shenanigans; these people are amazing and fun to talk to (although the sheer number of messages is alarming sometimes)! Many thanks to cwyscross for setting up the event, I've met so many wonderful people though it.

Kisuke is unrepentantly selfish and he knows it, which is why the niggling little wish shoved deep in his heart—soul, his soul, who is he kidding he doesn’t have a heart—surprises him so much.  It flutters and grows with every battle, every skirmish of the dragging Winter War That Just Won’t End, every time he sees Ichigo leading back his ragged team members, a little more torn out of Kisuke's lover’s heart with each death.

Not even the young man’s presence next to him while he sleeps—among the sands of Hueco Mundo, in the forests outside the Rukongai, in abandoned houses of Karakura Town, long empty of people in an effort to get Aizen to stop obsessing over it—can alleviate the ache in his chest.  Kisuke watches hungrily as Ichigo sleeps, face smoothed out and unlined in rest.  What he would give to see this young man grow up free, untainted by war and hardship.  Kisuke knows he would sacrifice everything he’s worked for, everything he cares about including Ichigo's hard-won love, for a chance to try again at this whole mess.

His wish is granted.  He wakes up one morning cold and alone, terrified beyond belief, to the Shoten's ceiling.  After a moment of raised spiritual pressure the entire house could probably sense--his bare sword in hand in case of ambush--he relaxes.  Tessai is taking an early-morning shower.  An experiment bubbles away in the room next door.  The children’s reiatsus fluctuate as they slumber.  Kisuke sheathes Benihime and drops down to his futon, rubbing at his forehead and breathing in the clean morning air.  He’s going to have to readjust to civilian life, to not being on edge and ready for an attack at any moment.  He doesn’t want to hurt anyone accidentally.

Very quickly, he finds out the date, and ponders it over a cup of tea.  The tea is nice, the milk in it feeling like a decadent luxury after a months-long campaign in Hueco Mundo.  He doesn’t think about the fact that they had been basically living there because everywhere else had been destroyed or occupied by enemies.  He’ll process that later.  Instead, he thinks about the implications of the date, a week before Rukia's assignment to Karakura Town.

Kisuke sips his tea.  He can’t implant the Hogyoku into her again, that would be a mistake.  He has to destroy it, and knowing what he knows now he has a fairly good idea of how to go about that now that he has access to his lab again.  He can use that to buy time to do something about Aizen's Hogyoku before it’s leveled into the Arrancar-creating phase—if Aizen can create his army of monsters again, then they’re screwed.

He deliberately doesn’t think about their allies among the Arrancar, those who Aizen used for one purpose and tossed aside like yesterday’s trash.  Thanks to Ichigo's special power of making friends and swaying them to his cause, their side had been a mix of everything at the end.  Despite the allies they had gained, he hoped things wouldn’t end up that way again, with the dead piled high enough they could hardly dissolve into reishi.  He started making contingency plans just in case.

Tessai gently pushes him aside, pouring another cup of tea.  “You’re up early,” he remarks mildly.

“Mm,” Kisuke agrees, staring out the window blankly.  What if he could create more allies himself?  He dismisses the idea—people are too unreliable in their loyalties; he couldn’t be sure of them.  Besides which, most people tend to be particularly squeamish about creating beings just to fight.

“Something on your mind?”

He sighs.  “Things are about to change very quickly.”

“Like whatever’s burning in that pot you’re heating?”

Kisuke turns towards the stove, which he’d left unattended in favor of his thoughts.  His rice is starting to smoke.  He reaches for the pot, but Tessai gets there first, rescuing what he can of the rice and proceeding to set up for breakfast.  Kisuke sighs, thinking about Ichigo and Yuzu's ability to make food out of anything or maybe nothing and still have it taste decent.

“Keep to your experiments and away from the food,” Tessai chides him quietly, warmly.  His old friend isn't prying, just leaving himself open if Kisuke wants to explain.  Kisuke had missed that the most about him.

“I saw something,” Kisuke begins, wincing at his own vagueness.  “Of our future.  It...” he trails off, unable to articulate what, exactly, it had been like.  He shrugs it off, unsettled.  “Old friend, thank you for always standing by me.”  He hesitates, unsure of what else to say, folding his shoulders inward and tracing lines on his teacup.

Tessai looks at him steadily, measuring.  Kisuke can only meet his eyes for a second before dropping them away and down.  He hopes his expression didn’t reveal too much, but apparently Tessai knows him better than that.

“Ah, I see.  I died.”  Kisuke flinches at Tessai's calm statement, recalling a sacrifice to buy time to move fifty injured, Jinta and Ururu's blood painting the walls from the surprise attack.  He thinks of meeting usually calm brown eyes lit up with fury, of fleeing the last of his found family only because Ichigo forced him to.

“Yes,” he chokes out.  “You did.”  And he says no more for several hours, retreating into his lab to rebuild his shields.

 

* * *

 

The problem with time travel, he muses, is that his tenses are all mixed up now.  He keeps thinking of Shinji in the past, before the man turns up in his living room again.  And Shinji—this Shinji, the one with his pack whole and undamaged—is so vibrant and alive, it’s difficult to think of him in past tense again.

“You’re awfully quiet, Kisuke,” he mentions offhandedly over tea, gleaming eyes missing nothing.  Kisuke resists the urge to fidget under the scrutiny—Shinji never rattled him before, Kisuke won’t let that start now.  “Do we have any new intel from Yoruichi?”

Kisuke flicks his fan in front of his face, if only to hide himself from those clever eyes.  “Just more of the same, I’m afraid!  Aizen seems to be quiet in between testing out some truly freakish Hollows.”

He tries not to think about what those tests had netted their enemy, what they had cost his allies.  As with most of his other future-memories, it doesn’t work.  A quick duck of his chin brings his hat’s brim down, shading his features from view.  He can compose himself in a moment.

Shinji doesn’t seem to notice, caught in his own pain.  Kisuke, shamefully, uses that to skate through the rest of the visit, and breathes a deep sigh of relief when Shinji leaves and he can bury himself in experiments.  He _will_ find another way to destroy the Hogyoku.

 

* * *

 

He’s in the lab again the night Rukia gives her powers to Ichigo.  Doesn’t even realize what night it is, at first, until he feels the flare of spiritual pressure from the Hollow closing in on Kurosaki Clinic, and for a heartbeat he’s frozen.

He shouldn’t go.  He might change the timeline (more) and then Ichigo might not get his powers.  At the same time, he considers the pros of Ichigo _not gaining his powers_.  But it’s a moot point anyway, because he hears the Hollow roar—although it’s probably his imagination at this distance—and Kisuke is shunpoing out the front door and above the city faster than he’s moved in a long time.  Belatedly, he remembers that Rukia and Ichigo are the family’s only line of defense, and uses it retroactively to justify watching over them.

Rukia is losing when he arrives, as she did last time.  He pulls his reiatsu in close, keeping his presence as quiet as he knows how, and watches.  Benihime is drawn at his side—just in case, he tells himself.  He seems to tell himself rationalizing things very often lately.

Ichigo arrives, and it’s a fight for Kisuke not to go to the aid of his beautiful, fiery lover, his student at this age.  He clenches his fists, Benihime stirring and growling in disapproval.  If he looked, he would see deep nail marks in his off hand's palm, the blood coming close to the surface.  He is tense and lost in memories as he forces himself to be a silent, unobtrusive watcher.  His resolve nearly goes out the window when Rukia stabs Ichigo through the chest—what if it doesn’t work, please don’t let this kill him, _please don’t let this kill_ him—and his heart palpitates in fear.

When the smoke clears, his eyes shoot wide open, and he fails to register his fan fluttering to the rooftop he’s standing on, as well as his knees failing to hold him up.  Ichigo is…there’s his fifteen-year-old body laying on the ground, but the shinigami standing in front of it is undeniably older, stress lines and battle scars clearly visible.  He looks like _Kisuke's_ Ichigo, and he tries to shut down the flutter of hope inside him.  The blast of reiatsu hits a drained Rukia like a train, and Ichigo catches and lays her on the ground.

Ichigo casually lifts his giant sword one-handed, and without fanfare moves faster than the eye can catch and slices the Hollow in two.  He pauses for a moment, looking at the clinic, the sky, and the street around him.  Then, unerringly, he turns to Kisuke, as if his ability to hide his reiatsu means nothing.

“Oi Kisuke, is this small fry the only one out here?”  Kisuke can see the light in his eyes even from this far away, sees the confusion that fades into love and trust, and his breath catches.  He’s suddenly glad to be in the past, as an irrational thought strikes him—if Ichigo had been here in the past alone, that Kisuke would have let him down.  That Kisuke wouldn’t be able to answer with a knowing, slightly hoarse—

“Yes.”  He takes a deep breath, slightly dizzy.  “Yes, that’s it.”

All else in Ichigo's expression fades into concern and worry, and before Kisuke even lists to the side Ichigo is there, strong hands catching him gently and cradling him close, keeping him from falling as always.  “We’re—we, _past_ ,” he manages, and Ichigo smiles, allowing him to clutch at the hand on his face and trace fingers over the redhead's every feature.  He gasps, “Rukia,” and Ichigo nods.

“She can wait a moment,” he says gently.  “You need to breathe more than she needs answers.”

He tries, struggles to draw in a breath and then loses it again as another panicked thought occurs to him.  “ _Aizen_.”

“Killed the camera flies already,” Ichigo states.  “He’ll think it was you.”

Kisuke allows himself—who is he kidding, he practically falls—to be pulled into the shelter of Ichigo's body, shaking and pressing his face into the familiar neck.

“How long have you been alone?” comes the low question.

“Weeks,” he mumbles, and a hand starts smoothing through his hair and down his back, long strokes that ease untold amounts of tension.

Uncharacteristically, he allows himself to fall apart.  Later, they will bring Rukia into the fold (Ichigo will demand it).  Later, they will plot and plan and argue and live.  Later, they will curl together in safety and try things that living on the run never gave them the chance to enjoy.  Later, his breathing slowing from those indeed enjoyable things, he will consider the possibility that _Ichigo_ is meant to change the past, and Kisuke is only meant to support him, and he will decide that’s perfectly alright.

Right now, his lover kisses him on the forehead and puts him back together, and the world rights itself.


End file.
